China's Historical Choice in Global Governance by He Yafei

Author:He Yafei [Yafei, He]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351737395
Goodreads: 37571153
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

2 From the 1st Opium War to the 1911 Revolution

After the 1st Opium War, China began to stir up for modernization. Under the Nanking Treaty concluded in 1842, China suffered a loss of territory and a huge amount of reparations, which smashed to pieces the Qing government’s policy of self-imposed isolation. China was forced to open ports along her southeastern coast and internal major rivers for commerce with Western powers, with Shanghai being its center. China was deprived of her control over border taxation, administrative power to run custom offices and legal jurisdiction over those parts of Chinese territory. National industry that just got started and was quite fragile was crowded out. China’s historical destiny suffered a detour.

China witnessed a surge of thinkers and reformers who believed that it was of great significance for China to proactively be part of globalization, and, therefore, they proposed to emulate the West, reform governance, strengthen the military and empower the nation. This group of people were called the “westernization group” who championed the long and painful process of China’s modernization. With the critique of traditional bias against foreigners, the idea of national sovereignty and “world consciousness” sprouted. The late Qing Dynasty saw the difficult transition of traditional diplomatic practices of many centuries to modern diplomacy.

Modernization of diplomacy was first of all a transformation of ideas, and as the first step, China had to break away from isolation. The key idea underpinning modern diplomacy is that nation-states always place their national interests above everything else as point of departure for formulating foreign policy. That forced the Qing government to put national interests over dynastic ones.

Western nations led by the U.S. and UK proposed to exchange envoys with the Qing government for the purpose of expanding their commercial and diplomatic privileges in China, but those moves also had the effect of changing the traditional mode of establishing diplomatic relations with China. The unequal treaties which were forced upon China after the Opium War have hindered modern international law in China. Western colonialists did not recognize China’s entitlement to be part of the international community and held that international law should not apply to China. This situation had not been rectified till the 2nd Opium War, when China was fully opened under the influence of “westernization group”.

That group believed that China’s involvement in globalization should not just be “passive”. They engaged in globalization to open China to exchanges with other countries and establish normal relations with them. The group proposed to set up a foreign affairs office and to make new foreign policies. They wanted to learn from Western modern knowledge of diplomacy by acquiring a basic understanding of international laws like sovereign equality. They studied the Western theory of power balance among nations in analyzing international situations and advanced the proposal to form alliances with one strong power to balance others. After accepting modern international law, including the principle of sovereign equality, the Qing government decided to send permanent envoys to foreign nations. The Western

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